3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie
during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement
Unix; so called because many features derived from
an earlier compiler named ‘B’ in commemoration of
its parent, BCPL. (BCPL was in turn descended from an
earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.) Before Bjarne Stroustrup settled the
question by designing C++, there was a humorous
debate over whether C's successor should be named ‘D’ or
‘P’. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about
1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer
applications programming. C is often described, with a mixture of fondness
and disdain varying according to the speaker, as “a language that
combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the
readability and maintainability of assembly language” See also
languages of choice, indent
style.